Straddling the Working Class Memoir
Daniel Nester
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As a newly-minted straddler memoirist, I’ve grown obsessed over distinctions: rich, middle class, voluntarily downwardly mobile, working class, working class with an asterisk. The website for Payday, “devoted to exploring working class art and life,” features a bibliography of “North American Working Class Autobiographies.” Included in the list are books “by middle class authors who, for one reason or another, take up working class life for a time.” I find this distinction absurd, even a bit comical; it summons up visions of faux working class memoirs that stress a time-specific hardship, where our memoirist goes native by mimicking our values with the proletariat karaoke of trucker hats, tattoos, and Dickies. Click here to continue reading.
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The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth
Sarah M. Wells
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The structure of The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard draws the reader in by the unique, captivating, honest voice and hooks the reader by the relationships caught on the page. Beard reels us in and then flings us back into the water again only to hook us with a different kind of bait in the second half of the book. The book turns, like an Italian sonnet, at the Big Event, which sends us spinning in a new kind of truth held in contrast with the truths in the first half of the book. Click here to continue reading.
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Ted Kooser's "Hands": On Amobae, Empathy, and Poetic Prose
Chris Harding Thornton
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One day, I read Ted Kooser’s essay “Hands,” which appears in the anthology In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones, for a studio course in creative nonfiction. In Kooser’s piece, a persona contemplates seeing his father’s hands sprouting from his own arms, except in a much more poetic and less disturbing way than the word “sprouting” might suggest.
I read along, floating on the imagery and sound, the general beauty of the thing, when I ran into this sentence: “They are exactly as I remember them from his own middle age—wrinkled, of course, with a slight sheen to the tiny tilework of the skin; with knotted branching veins, and with thin dark hair that sets out from beneath the shirtcuffs as if to cover the hand but that within an inch thins and disappears as if there were a kind of glacial timberline there.” I ask you: what the hell is that? Click here to continue reading. |
The Essay in Parts
Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna
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Eudora Welty explained in The Eye of the Story that a composition first comes to her as a shape, a shape that wants to be filled in. It is hard to describe this experience, but that is what happens to me, too. When I feel the urge, which I resist as long as possible, to write an essay it comes to me not as a phrase or an image, but as a shape with a feeling attached that I haul around with me long before the first words come to mind. I can feel its heft. The essay arrives as a whole, and my task as a writer is to fill in the parts. I hope, of course, that it ends up being more than that, exceeding my expectations, but if it is ever to get beyond an amorphous cloud in my mind, it must at least be the sum of its parts. Click here to continue reading.
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Animals as Aperture:
How Three Essayists Use Animals to Convey Meaning and Emotion
Megan Culhane Galbraith
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The role of animals in nonfiction that I examine here is very much apart from Burrough’s claims and the vast genre of ecocriticism. Animals have a rich tradition in fiction, but their presence in contemporary nonfiction is rarely considered in the same way. Yet essayists employ animal counterparts to convey deep feeling and provide deeper meaning about themselves and the subjects they are writing about. This essay is emphatically not a dive into ecocriticism; rather, it is a close study of how authors of nonfiction use animals as a prism through which they can show readers their secret selves and amplify the narrative. Using animals as a literary device in this way, Charles G. D. Roberts said, “frees us for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities, and from the mean tenement of self” (29). Click here to continue reading.
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